OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Stabilizing dual-energy X-ray computed tomography reconstructions using patch-based regularization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2014
Year: 2014

Recent years have seen growing interest in exploiting dual- and multi-energy measurements in computed tomography (CT) in order to characterize material properties as well as object shape. Material characterization is performed by decomposing the scene into constitutive basis functions, such as Compton scatter and photoelectric absorption functions. While well motivated physically, the joint recovery of the spatial distribution of photoelectric and Compton properties is severely complicated by the fact that the data are several orders of magnitude more sensitive to Compton scatter coefficients than to photoelectric absorption, so small errors in Compton estimates can create large artifacts in the photoelectric estimate. To address these issues, we propose a model-based iterative approach which uses patch-based regularization terms to stabilize inversion of photoelectric coefficients, and solve the resulting problem though use of computationally attractive Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) solution techniques. Using simulations and experimental data acquired on a commercial scanner, we demonstrate that the proposed processing can lead to more stable material property estimates which should aid materials characterization in future dual- and multi-energy CT systems.
Bridging Utility Maximization and Regret Minimization
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2014
Year: 2014

We relate the strategy sets that a player ends up with after refining his own strategies according to two very different models of rationality: namely, utility maximization and regret minimization.
Model-based construction of Open Non-uniform Cylindrical Algebraic Decompositions
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2014
Year: 2014

In this paper we introduce the notion of an Open Non-uniform Cylindrical Algebraic Decomposition (NuCAD), and present an efficient model-based algorithm for constructing an Open NuCAD from an input formula. A NuCAD is a generalization of Cylindrical Algebraic Decomposition (CAD) as defined by Collins in his seminal work from the early 1970s, and as extended in concepts like Hong's partial CAD. A NuCAD, like a CAD, is a decomposition of n-dimensional real space into cylindrical cells. But unlike a CAD, the cells in a NuCAD need not be arranged cylindrically. It is in this sense that NuCADs are not uniformly cylindrical. However, NuCADs--- like CADs --- carry a tree-like structure that relates different cells. It is a very different tree but, as with the CAD tree structure, it allows some operations to be performed efficiently, for example locating the containing cell for an arbitrary input point.
Image Retargeting by Content-Aware Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2014
Year: 2014

Real-world images usually contain vivid contents and rich textural details, which will complicate the manipulation on them. In this paper, we design a new framework based on content-aware synthesis to enhance content-aware image retargeting. By detecting the textural regions in an image, the textural image content can be synthesized rather than simply distorted or cropped. This method enables the manipulation of textural & non-textural regions with different strategy since they have different natures. We propose to retarget the textural regions by content-aware synthesis and non-textural regions by fast multi-operators. To achieve practical retargeting applications for general images, we develop an automatic and fast texture detection method that can detect multiple disjoint textural regions. We adjust the saliency of the image according to the features of the textural regions. To validate the proposed method, comparisons with state-of-the-art image targeting techniques and a user study were conducted. Convincing visual results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Sign Language Lexical Recognition With Propositional Dynamic Logic
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2014
Year: 2014

This paper explores the use of Propositional Dynamic Logic (PDL) as a suitable formal framework for describing Sign Language (SL), the language of deaf people, in the context of natural language processing. SLs are visual, complete, standalone languages which are just as expressive as oral languages. Signs in SL usually correspond to sequences of highly specific body postures interleaved with movements, which make reference to real world objects, characters or situations. Here we propose a formal representation of SL signs, that will help us with the analysis of automatically-collected hand tracking data from French Sign Language (FSL) video corpora. We further show how such a representation could help us with the design of computer aided SL verification tools, which in turn would bring us closer to the development of an automatic recognition system for these languages.
Probably Approximately Symmetric: Fast rigid Symmetry Detection with Global Guarantees
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2014
Year: 2014

We present a fast algorithm for global rigid symmetry detection with approximation guarantees. The algorithm is guaranteed to find the best approximate symmetry of a given shape, to within a user-specified threshold, with very high probability. Our method uses a carefully designed sampling of the transformation space, where each transformation is efficiently evaluated using a sub-linear algorithm. We prove that the density of the sampling depends on the total variation of the shape, allowing us to derive formal bounds on the algorithm's complexity and approximation quality. We further investigate different volumetric shape representations (in the form of truncated distance transforms), and in such a way control the total variation of the shape and hence the sampling density and the runtime of the algorithm. A comprehensive set of experiments assesses the proposed method, including an evaluation on the eight categories of the COSEG data-set. This is the first large-scale evaluation of any symmetry detection technique that we are aware of.
Bitcoin Transaction Malleability and MtGox
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2014
Year: 2014

In Bitcoin, transaction malleability describes the fact that the signatures that prove the ownership of bitcoins being transferred in a transaction do not provide any integrity guarantee for the signatures themselves. This allows an attacker to mount a malleability attack in which it intercepts, modifies, and rebroadcasts a transaction, causing the transaction issuer to believe that the original transaction was not confirmed. In February 2014 MtGox, once the largest Bitcoin exchange, closed and filed for bankruptcy claiming that attackers used malleability attacks to drain its accounts. In this work we use traces of the Bitcoin network for over a year preceding the filing to show that, while the problem is real, there was no widespread use of malleability attacks before the closure of MtGox.
Network coding for multicasting over Rayleigh fading multi access channels
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2014
Year: 2014

This paper examines the problem of rate allocation for multicasting over slow Rayleigh fading channels using network coding. In the proposed model, the network is treated as a collection of Rayleigh fading multiple access channels. In this model, rate allocation scheme that is based solely on the statistics of the channels is presented. The rate allocation scheme is aimed at minimizing the outage probability. An upper bound is presented for the probability of outage in the fading multiple access channel. A suboptimal solution based on this bound is given. A distributed primal-dual gradient algorithm is derived to solve the rate allocation problem.
ICT Support for Regulatory Compliance of Business Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2014
Year: 2014

In this paper we propose an ITC (Information and Communication Technology) approach to support regulatory compliance for business processes, and we report on the development and evaluation of a business process compliance checker called Regorous, based on the compliance-by-design methodology proposed by Governatori and Sadiq
Covering numbers of $L_p$-balls of convex sets and functions
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

We prove bounds for the covering numbers of classes of convex functions and convex sets in Euclidean space. Previous results require the underlying convex functions or sets to be uniformly bounded. We relax this assumption and replace it with weaker integral constraints. Existing results can be recovered as special cases of our results.
Emergency Route Selection for D2D Cellular Communications During an Urban Terrorist Attack
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2014
Year: 2014

Device-to-Device (D2D) communications is a technology that allows mobile users to relay information to each other, without access to the cellular network. In this paper, we consider how to dynamically select multi-hop routes for D2D communications in spectrum co-existence with a fully loaded cellular network. The modelling scenario is that of a real urban environment, when the cellular network is congested during an unexpected event, such as a terrorist attack. We use D2D to relay data across the urban terrain, in the presence of conventional cellular (CC) communications. We consider different wireless routing algorithms, namely: shortest-path-routing (SPR), interference-aware-routing (IAR), and broadcast-routing (BR). In general, there is a fundamental trade-off between D2D and CC outage performances, due to their mutual interference relationship. For different CC outage constraints and D2D end-to-end distances, the paper recommends different D2D routing strategies. The paper also considers the effects of varying user density and urban building material properties on overall D2D relaying feasibility. Over a distance of a kilometre, it was found that the success probability of D2D communications can reach 91% for a moderate participating user density (400 per square km) and a low wall penetration loss (<10dB).
Pyramidal Fisher Motion for Multiview Gait Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2014
Year: 2014

The goal of this paper is to identify individuals by analyzing their gait. Instead of using binary silhouettes as input data (as done in many previous works) we propose and evaluate the use of motion descriptors based on densely sampled short-term trajectories. We take advantage of state-of-the-art people detectors to define custom spatial configurations of the descriptors around the target person. Thus, obtaining a pyramidal representation of the gait motion. The local motion features (described by the Divergence-Curl-Shear descriptor) extracted on the different spatial areas of the person are combined into a single high-level gait descriptor by using the Fisher Vector encoding. The proposed approach, coined Pyramidal Fisher Motion, is experimentally validated on the recent `AVA Multiview Gait' dataset. The results show that this new approach achieves promising results in the problem of gait recognition.
Optimizing large applications
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2014
Year: 2014

Both uppermost open source compilers, GCC and LLVM, are mature enough to link-time optimize large applications. In case of large applications, we must take into account, except standard speed efficiency and memory consumption, different aspects. We focus on size of the code, cold start-up time, etc. Developers of applications often come up with ad-hoc solutions such as Elfhack utility, start-up of an application via a pre-loading utility and dlopen; prelinking and variety of different tools that reorder functions to fit the order of execution. The goal of the thesis is to analyse all existing techniques of optimization, evaluate their efficiency and design new solutions based on the link-time optimization platform.
Closed-Form Training of Conditional Random Fields for Large Scale Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2014
Year: 2014

We present LS-CRF, a new method for very efficient large-scale training of Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). It is inspired by existing closed-form expressions for the maximum likelihood parameters of a generative graphical model with tree topology. LS-CRF training requires only solving a set of independent regression problems, for which closed-form expression as well as efficient iterative solvers are available. This makes it orders of magnitude faster than conventional maximum likelihood learning for CRFs that require repeated runs of probabilistic inference. At the same time, the models learned by our method still allow for joint inference at test time. We apply LS-CRF to the task of semantic image segmentation, showing that it is highly efficient, even for loopy models where probabilistic inference is problematic. It allows the training of image segmentation models from significantly larger training sets than had been used previously. We demonstrate this on two new datasets that form a second contribution of this paper. They consist of over 180,000 images with figure-ground segmentation annotations. Our large-scale experiments show that the possibilities of CRF-based image segmentation are far from exhausted, indicating, for example, that semi-supervised learning and the use of non-linear predictors are promising directions for achieving higher segmentation accuracy in the future.
Tailored Security: Building Nonrepudiable Security Service-Level Agreements
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2014
Year: 2014

The security features of current digital services are mostly defined and dictated by the service provider (SP). A user can always decline to use a service whose terms do not fulfill the expected criteria, but in many cases, even a simple negotiation might result in a more satisfying outcome. This article aims at building nonrepudiable security service-level agreements (SSLAs) between a user and an SP. The proposed mechanism provides a means to describe security requirements and capabilities in different dimensions, from overall targets and risks to technical specifications, and it also helps in translating between the dimensions. A negotiation protocol and a decision algorithm are then used to let the parties agree on the security features used in the service. This article demonstrates the feasibility and usability of the mechanism by describing its usage scenario and proof-of-concept implementation and analyzes its nonrepudiability and security aspects.
Active Switching: Packet Steering Flow Annotations
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2014
Year: 2014

Our previous experience building systems for middlebox chain composition and scaling in software-defined networks has revealed that existing mechanisms of flow annotation commonly do not survive middlebox-traversals, or suffer from extreme identifier domain limitations resulting in excessive flow table size. In this paper, we analyze the structural artifacts resulting in these challenges, and offer a framework for describing the behavior of middleboxes based on actions taken on traversing packets. We then present a novel mechanism for flow annotation that features an identifier domain significantly larger than existing techniques, that is transparent to hosts traversed, and that conserves flow-table resources by requiring only a small number of match rules and actions in most switches. We evaluate said technique, showing that it requires less per-switch state than conventional techniques. We then describe extensions allowing implementation of this architecture within a broader class of systems. Finally, we close with architectural suggestions for enabling straightforward integration of middleboxes within software-defined networks.
User Cooperation in Wireless Powered Communication Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

This paper studies user cooperation in the emerging wireless powered communication network (WPCN) for throughput optimization. For the purpose of exposition, we consider a two-user WPCN, in which one hybrid access point (H-AP) broadcasts wireless energy to two distributed users in the downlink (DL) and the users transmit their independent information using their individually harvested energy to the H-AP in the uplink (UL) through time-division-multiple-access (TDMA). We propose user cooperation in the WPCN where the user which is nearer to the H-AP and has a better channel for DL energy harvesting and UL information transmission uses part of its allocated UL time and DL harvested energy to help to relay the far user's information to the H-AP, in order to achieve more balanced throughput optimization. We maximize the weighted sum-rate (WSR) of the two users by jointly optimizing the time and power allocations in the network for both wireless energy transfer in the DL and wireless information transmission and relaying in the UL. Simulation results show that the proposed user cooperation scheme can effectively improve the achievable throughput in the WPCN with desired user fairness.
Generating Complete and Finite Test Suite for ioco: Is It Possible?
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2014
Year: 2014

Testing from Input/Output Transition Systems has been intensely investigated. The conformance between the implementation and the specification is often determined by the so-called ioco-relation. However, generating tests for ioco is usually hindered by the problem of conflicts between inputs and outputs. Moreover, the generation is mainly based on nondeterministic methods, which may deliver complete test suites but require an unbounded number of executions. In this paper, we investigate whether it is possible to construct a finite test suite which is complete in a predefined fault domain for the classical ioco relation even in the presence of input/output conflicts. We demonstrate that it is possible under certain assumptions about the specification and implementation, by proposing a method for complete test generation, based on a traditional method developed for FSM.
A Mining Method to Create Knowledge Map by Analysing the Data Resource
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

The fundamental step in measuring the robustness of a system is the synthesis of the so called Process Map.This is generally based on the user raw data material.Process Maps are of fundamental importance towards the understanding of the nature of a system in that they indicate which variables are causally related and which are particularly important.This paper represent the system Map or business structure map to understand business criteria studying the various aspects of the company.The business structure map or knowledge map or Process map are used to increase the growth of the company by giving some useful measures according to the business criteria.This paper also deals with the different company strategy to reduce the risk factors.Process Map is helpful for building such knowledge successfully.Making decisions from such map in a highly complex situation requires more knowledge and resources.
Constant time encryption as a countermeasure against remote cache timing attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2014
Year: 2014

Rijndael was standardized in 2001 by National Institute of Standard and Technology as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). AES is still being used to encrypt financial, military and even government confidential data. In 2005, Bernstein illustrated a remote cache timing attack on AES using the client-server architecture and therefore proved a side channel in its software implementation. Over the years, a number of countermeasures have been proposed against cache timing attacks both using hardware and software. Although the software based countermeasures are flexible and easy to deploy, most of such countermeasures are vulnerable to statistical analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel software based countermeasure against cache timing attacks, known as constant time encryption, which we believe is secure against statistical analysis. The countermeasure we proposed performs rescheduling of instructions such that the encryption rounds will consume constant time independent of the cache hits and misses. Through experiments, we prove that our countermeasure is secure against Bernstein's cache timing attack.
Accelerating string matching for bio-computing applications on multi-core CPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2014
Year: 2014

Huge amount of data in the form of strings are being handled in bio-computing applications and searching algorithms are quite frequently used in them. Many methods utilizing on both software and hardware are being proposed to accelerate processing of such data. The typical hardware-based acceleration techniques either require special hardware such as general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) or need building a new hardware such as an FPGA based design. On the other hard, software-based acceleration techniques are easier since they only require some changes in the software code or the software architecture. Typical software-based techniques make use of computers connected over a network, also known as a network grid to accelerate the processing. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that multi-core architectures should provide better performance in this kind of computation, but still it would depend on the algorithm selected as well as the programming model being utilized. We present the acceleration of a string-searching algorithm on a multi-core CPU via a POSIX thread based implementation. Our implementation on an 8-core processor (that supports 16-threads) resulted in 9x throughput improvement compared to a single thread implementation.
Improving the throughput of the AES algorithm with multicore processors
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2014
Year: 2014

AES, Advanced Encryption Standard, can be considered the most widely used modern symmetric key encryption standard. To encrypt/decrypt a file using the AES algorithm, the file must undergo a set of complex computational steps. Therefore a software implementation of AES algorithm would be slow and consume large amount of time to complete. The immense increase of both stored and transferred data in the recent years had made this problem even more daunting when the need to encrypt/decrypt such data arises. As a solution to this problem, in this paper, we present an extensive study of enhancing the throughput of AES encryption algorithm by utilizing the state of the art multicore architectures. We take a sequential program that implements the AES algorithm and convert the same to run on multicore architectures with minimum effort. We implement two different parallel programmes, one with the fork system call in Linux and the other with the pthreads, the POSIX standard for threads. Later, we ran both the versions of the parallel programs on different multicore architectures and compared and analysed the throughputs between the implementations and among different architectures. The pthreads implementation outperformed in all the experiments we conducted and the best throughput obtained is around 7Gbps on a 32-core processor (the largest number of cores we had) with the pthreads implementation.